I did some fiddling around and found TWO areas that I had to make modifications.

The first modification I made was inside the settings for my anti-virus program: Microsoft Security Essentials. After playing around, I found that one particular setting was causing 10 seconds of the 13+ second delay: the Enable behavior monitoring setting.

The next culprit was the fact that HttpWebRequest will use the default proxy set in IE. I do not have a proxy set, but it was still causing about a 3 second delay. The solution was to create a .config file for my program that turned this behavior off.

1: <?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8"?>

2: <configuration>

3: <system.net>

4: <defaultProxy>

5: <proxyautoDetect="false"/>

6: </defaultProxy>

7: </system.net>

8: </configuration>

Another method is to disable the Automatic Proxy Detection in Internet Explorer: